Hayden Pedigo at Gretchen / Tuesday, 30.1.2024

So run the reels of »The Happiest Times I Ever Ignored«, Hayden Pedigo’s sixth studio album (and second for Mexican Summer) in the cinema of your ear; its script written in steel-string, its starring director a 28-year-old performance artist, politician, model, and fingerstyling maestro whose talent is as irrepressible as it is undeniable.

Pedigo has lived many lives, having been homeschooled in Amarillo, Texas by his truck-stop preacher father; run for Amarillo City Council in 2019, aged 25—as documented by Jasmine Stodel’s SXSW-premiering, PBS-acquired film Kid Candidate—and struck up pen-friendships and collaborative partnerships with the likes of Terry Allen, Charles Hayward (This Heat), Werner “Zappi” Diermaier (Faust), and Tim Heidecker.

A move south from Amarillo to Lubbock in 2020 put a spark to the powder keg of his creativity. “It’s even more flat, desolate, windy and dirty – like being on Mars,” Pedigo observes. “It’s pushed me to create more because there’s not really much to distract.” The move produced not only The Happiest Times and its predecessor Letting Go, but also an Internet presence that showcases a panoply of ever-more outlandish outfits and an effortless deadpan wit. Both the former and the latter helped parlay him into the fashion world, too, having walked the runway for Gucci and been photographed by Hedi Slimane.

Inspired by the tragicomedic legacy of National Lampoon co-founder Doug Kenney (in whose notes the line ‘These last few days are amongst the happiest I’ve ever ignored’ was found following his mysterious and untimely death), Pedigo embarked upon The Happiest Times with a no-shit aim: to create “the best instrumental acoustic guitar album of the past twenty years. ”Though canonical works of comedy and music show their influence—the mournful beauty of Nick Drake, the puckish abandon of John Fahey—Pedigo by no means places their creators on pedestals; if anything pulling them from their plinths, smashing the alabasters, pocketing some pieces, gluing others back together upside down, or leaving them floating free.

How might Fahey have played in a Midwest emo band? Pedigo posits on “Nearer, Nearer” while the specters of Bert Jansch and John Renbourn float somewhere above “Signal of Hope” – “the most British-sounding thing I’ve ever written;” an echo in an empty church. Pedigo flits through the cycle of songs, coiling and uncoiling like the mechanism of a clockwork bird on “When It’s Clear;” rambling, a tiny speck in the landscape, on “Elsewhere.” “Then It’s Gone” stands as stark as a leafless tree, guitar spilling a somber tale in its truest voice – and nowhere more than on the title track is Pedigo’s playing more affecting: regret and optimism balanced on intimate, intricate arrangement, as carefully poised as raindrops on guitar strings.